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The Wilderness Above (astronomy)

Of clocks and calendars

It’s most likely that none of us has completely adjusted to Daylight Saving Time (DST, or Eastern Daylight Time for us ... EDT) after moving our clocks forward an hour early Sunday morning. Each time we change the clocks to daylight time in the spring and back to standard time in the late ...

The Orion molecular cloud complex

On Feb. 17, Edward Guinan of Villanova University, who has been closely watching Betelgeuse, reported that it has stopped the dimming I described in my column of Feb.1. It is remarkably dimmer, 36% below normal, than any of us have ever seen. Astronomers now expect the giant start to slowly ...

Betelgeuse is fading

The large, bright, glittering constellations of winter illuminate our southern sky in the early evenings of February. As shown in Figure 1, at 8 p.m., Orion stands high in the south above Tupper Lake. Stretching 30 degrees vertically and about 20 degrees horizontally, it is one of the ...

Super to see a supernova

Our universe is far larger than most of our tiny minds can fathom. However, one thing we know is that it is driven by forces which create astounding degrees of violence. There are, of course, also millions if not billions of years of relative stability in the lives of objects in the universe ...

Winter view of the northern sky

Turning to the north, this week, we see the great bear rising from the northeastern horizon. In the fall, Ursa Major walks along the northern horizon seeking a den for hibernation. It spends the spring rising so that it’s at its highest with the bear’s back knee, marked by Psi Ursae Majoris ...

The depth of the winter sky

In this dark part of the year, a moonless sky can seem particularly deep. Part of the reason for this is the lack of bright constellations in the southern sky visible in the early evenings. There are very few bright stars between the Great Square of Pegasus and Orion. This is due to the fact ...